SportsLetter

Nike Grind

It takes a village ... of 75,000 recycled shoes to make one synthetic-surface soccer field.  The LA84 Foundation and Nike are partnering to create 84 new playing surfaces at sports facilities in Los Angeles.  Nike Grind, recycled rubber left over from the manufacture of Nike shoes, is a key component in the resurfacing project.  Learn more about it in a new video at vimeo.com.

SL Interview: Michael Sokolove examines the prevalence of injuries in girls' sports

A contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, journalist Michael Sokolove is the author of "Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw," about the 1979 Crenshaw High School baseball team in Los Angeles, and "Hustle: The Myths, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose." 

 

Sokolove's latest book, "Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports" (Simon & Schuster / Amazon) examines the culture of sports for young women.  Sokolove applauds the fact that, since the passage of Title IX in 1972, the numbers of girls who participate in sports programs – at the high-school, club, and college levels – has increased dramatically.  Writes Sokolove: "Athletic girls seem happier, more confident, more in control of their bodies and their destinies than girls who do not put themselves in motion, who do not compete, who do not experience all the highs and lows and disappointments and exultations than have long driven boys onto the field of play."

His book, however, notes that there's an "unforeseen and largely invisible consequence of the women's sports revolution."  Writes Sokolove: "Girls suffer a whole range of injuries at greater rates than boys … The most serious problem, by far, is the routine incidence of major knee injuries in girls – mainly tears to the anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL … Girls tear their ACLs at rates as high as eight times that of boys."

 

The book's premise is not without its detractors.  As Sokolove notes in the interview below, the Tucker Center Research for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, at the University of Minnesota, has drafted "a multidisciplinary response" to the book on its website. According to Nicole LaVoi, the associate director of the Tucker Center, "Framing the issue of sport injuries as an inevitable biological difference in the sex of the athlete is sensationalistic and irresponsible."

   

SportsLetter spoke with Sokolove by phone from his home in Bethesda, Md.  – David Davis

Sign of the times

Richard Crepeau, of the University of Central Florida, where he teaches American sport history, 20th Century U.S. history and American cultural history, takes a dim view of the notion that sport builds character.  On poppolitics.com Crepeau offers recent examples of Parents-Gone-Wild in youth sports, and derides a system in which the "child as surrogate for the parent has reached pathological levels."

Mascot

Lake Placid revisited

In February, the world championships in luge, bobsleigh and skeleton will be held in Lake Placid, New York.  It isn't the first time Lake Placid has played host to an international event.  The 1932 Olympic Winter Games saw 1920 Olympic boxing gold medalist Eddie Eagan (United States) pick up a gold medal as a member of the four-man bobsleigh.  He remains the only Olympian to earn gold medals in summer and winter Olympic Games.  And in 1980, of course, Lake Placid was the site of the amazing accomplishments of Eric Heiden and the "Do You Believe in Miracles?" US Olympic hockey team.

Olympic Games fans also were introduced to Roni Raccoon who, according to the International Olympic Committee website, was "the first mascot to appear in sporting poses on various products."

Roni won't be around Lake Placid this month to help luge, skeleton and bobsleigh fans enjoy the world championships, but SportsLetter has learned that Bobby the Bobsledder and Larry the Luger are ready to slide into their roles as hosts.   

 

 

Watching youth sports

When we launched the SportsLetter blog a few weeks ago, we noted that youth sport has become a social phenomenon of considerable magnitude.  In the United States, by some estimates, 80% of all children play organized sports before the age of 18.  Youth sports, for better or worse, also has the ability to attract large numbers of spectators.

 

The recently completed World Junior Hockey Championship, featuring players ages 17 to 19, drew 453,282 spectators in Ottawa over an 11-day period.  The television audience for the semi-final between Russia and eventual champion Canada drew twice as many television viewers as the Hockey Night in Canada broadcast of the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Ottawa Senators NHL game. 

Good Hoosiers everywhere seem to know a good thing when they see it.  The total combined attendance for the 2008 boys and girls Indiana state high school basketball tournaments was over 600,000.

And FIFA's Under 17 boys soccer world championships have had total attendance crowds in excess of 500,000 in 2005 and 400,000 in 2007.  This year's U-17 World Cup tournament will be hosted by 2007 U-17 World Cup winners Nigeria.  It will be interesting to see if the opportunity to watch the reigning world champions in action will be enough to get fans into the stadiums.

No word on whether Dr. Clement Okon is part of the organizing committee.  Let’s hope not.

 

 

Nike football clinics

It's the silly season in college football.  A time for fans, pundits and media talking heads to dissect and debate the season that just ended, and the recruiting season that is under way.  As some college coaches from Nike-sponsored schools schmooze recruits, they also are working on their presentations for the 2009 Nike Coach of the Year Clinics. 

Promising an opportunity to pick up "techniques, philosophy, pointers and strategy from the most respected men" in college coaching, the clinics hosted almost 13,000 high school coaches in 2008.

The football clinics kick-off (sorry) in St. Louis on January 29th with presentations by, among others, Todd Graham of Tulsa, Bob Stoops of Oklahoma and Jim Tressel of THE Ohio State.  Other sites include Dallas, Connecticut, Chicago, and Las Vegas.  The final clinic is in Los Angeles on March 27th.

Recruit yourself. We can help.

When high school athletes are talented enough or play in big-time athletic programs, college recruiting magazines often are hovering around to observe every dig, block or throw.

For athletes who play on less-publicized teams, or have talents they feel have been underappreciated or overlooked, or who simply don’t want college coaches eating ‘tater salad and watching movies with their grandmothers, there are other options. 

Recruiting services, or private athletic-recruiting counselors, will put together a recruiting package and forward that package to selected universities.  Like most personalized services, there are fees, and some of those fees can be a bit hefty for a family trying to feed an offensive lineman.  As documented in a recent Wall Street Journal article, there are other options.  With costs ranging from free to nearly $1,000, “do-it-yourself” recruiting websites enable parents and athletes to produce recruiting packages on their own.  As one parent from the article put it, "You really can do this stuff yourself.  To pay someone $2,000 just seems crazy."

This year, Jamestown College in North Dakota has nine freshmen on its football team the coaches found through one of the “do-it-yourself” websites.  For the record, the NAIA Division II school finished with an overall record of 7-3 and a 5-2 record in the Dakota Athletic Conference; good enough for second place in the conference, but not quite good enough to get invited to the 16 team NAIA Football Championship.

The doping debate

The ongoing issue of doping in sports has spawned a variety of websites and discussion boards espousing a wide range of viewpoints.  See for example, http://www.steroidreport.com and http://www.mesomorphosis.com, as well as http://www.cheatorbeat.com, which invites readers to weigh in on whether athletic performances were achieved with or without banned substances.

 

A new entry on the World Wide Web is ProCon.org.  ProCon offers readers the opportunity to participate in an online debate on the question "Should performance-enhancing drugs (such as steroids) be accepted in sports?"

An example of some subjects of discussion include whether or not:

 

**Tiger Woods' alleged LASIK surgery to improve his vision to 20/15 is ethically different than an athlete taking a banned substance.

**The testing labs, such as the one that found cyclist Floyd Landis guilty of using banned drugs, are credible and reliable.

**There is a correalation between the 5% (approximate) of middle schoolers who take anabolic steroids and the use of such substances by their athlete role models.

 

Hitting the books

We’ve witnessed some exciting moments in the 2008-09 college football bowl season, with more sure to follow.  As college teams hope to continue their successful seasons with a bowl victory on the field, the Associated Press has taken the time to look at the effort colleges have made in the other half of the student-athlete equation.  According to a recent AP article :

The last five years have seen an astounding jump in the time, money and resources devoted to academic support for student-athletes, even as some faculty complain that just plain students are being left behind. To learn more about the trend, The Associated Press surveyed the 65 schools from the six major conferences involved in the Bowl Championship Series plus independent Notre Dame.

The AP started work before the first kickoff of the season and eventually obtained at least some financial information from 45 schools about the resources they devote to graduating athletes.

The picture formed by the data is one of schools frequently spending more than $1 million annually on academic support, with some spending hundreds of thousands of dollars more in 2008 than they did in 2004, the AP found. Eight BCS schools reported spending increases of more than 70 percent in the last five years.

Four -- South Florida, Illinois, Georgia and Kansas -- more than doubled spending.

Helping athletes graduate has become its own academic profession. A national group for people who work in the field has nearly doubled its membership to around 1,000 in just two years. Many work in new academic centers devoted exclusively to athletes.

Behind the spending binge, fueled by both public and private funds, are toughened NCAA regulations that now punish schools for poor academic performance.

Expensive by the dozen

Following the lead of neighboring states, the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association (NHIAA) Soccer Committee has modified its rules banning teams from post-season play.  Any team that accumulates 12 yellow cards – or four red cards – during the 16-game regular season is banned from post-season competition.  Foes and supporters of the ban have weighed in with their concerns, but any attempt to promote better sportsmanship should be applauded.